


tendershipping manifesto

by booooin



Category: Multi-Fandom, No Fandom, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Yu-Gi-Oh! Series
Genre: Analysis, Character Analysis, Essays, M/M, Meta, Metafiction, Nonfiction, OTP Feels, Ship Manifesto, Yaoi, kind of academic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-25
Updated: 2017-11-25
Packaged: 2019-02-06 12:30:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12817557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/booooin/pseuds/booooin
Summary: a tendershipping manifesto fan essay, about race and trauma, about masochism and the self/the Other. This is about abuse!fic and the waysyaoidevelops a space for creating the queer self.-written with love from a ten year long tendershipper ruminating on what this ship has meant to me and done to me throughout the years.





	tendershipping manifesto

I was thirteen when I was first introduced to tendershipping. It also showed me as a thirteen year old kid what sex was. Before, I thought that sex was just kissing or literally sleeping together. So, when I talk about tendershipping, I am also talking about myself as a young, lonely, gay, asian kid going through puberty in the Midwest.

The romanticism of lonely!Ryou drew me in first. I loved imagining myself as him because he seemed like a better story than me, more personally tragic and less systemically oppressed. Ryou with his long white hair, always beautiful and _mukokusei_ (beyond race) (Iwabuchi, 78). Add Bakura in and you didn’t just get an edgier version of him - you got his opposite, the abuser to his victimhood, the sadist to his masochism, the yang to his yin, right there in the same body.

Tendershipping showed me that not only is gender is just a presentation, but your entire personhood is a presentation. You personhood is not defined by your body when you have an enraged 3000 year old spirit haunting you.

Ten years ago, tendership fic _was_ abuse fic. This was a complete overlap of categorization. The more violent and psychologically manipulative Bakura got, the more beautiful Ryou’s suffering and pain became. There was a formulaic plot, as romance plots go. Bakura would hurt Ryou in some way, more and more extreme, until there was either a breaking point or some original extra stock character raped Ryou. Sometimes, Bakura raped Ryou. Rape was still the ultimate “bad thing” that could happen in fic verse. Only after that moment, understanding would begin to develop between the two characters (one character?). 

It speaks to the pathology of our times that this plot formula has become so attractive. There is the despair of watching Ryou break down and then the bittersweet jubilee of finally his pain being acknowledged. It speaks to how we think about abuse that it requires the exquisite sacrifice of of an imaginary body poised in perpetual victimhood before the capacity to feel is _seen_. Once the pain is acknowledged, both the abuser and victim can finally become human.

But tendershipping is not just a story about self and other. It is about the multiplicity of self. Bakura and Ryou share a body and an existence and this aspect is an integral part of the sticky complexity of this ship. Not only that but _yaoi_ is popular because of offers a multiplicity of identification to its readers - _yaoi_ readers use the _seme_ and _uke_ trope characters in order to speak to themselves about processes of domination and suffering in all relationships, not just love relationships, not because we are necessarily attracted to one character or because we believe that the characters can be substitutes for real people. Furthermore, tendershipping fics, and most _yaoi_ fics, usually do not portray social characters with a world around them - they tend to portray introverted characters who only care about each other, referencing the outside world very little, for readers who prioritize scenes that show the main characters together. This is an important part of these stories because they do not strive to be realistic. They strive to be fiction and they are stories about a self within the self.

“The masochist body is a miraculous body, where pain turns into bliss, where abjection turns into a massive force of life. The masochist body is the sublime text” (106), Hosea Hirata claims. Oe Kenzaburo describes “the political human being” as one who “struggles against others in a cold, hardened manner. In this struggle, he either kills others or makes them disappear into his own system…On the contrary, _the sexual human being_ neither conforms nor struggles against others…as far as he is concerned, from the beginning, others simply do not exist" (Hirata, 95). Tendershipping is exactly this “sublime text” or the masochist body, fiction as body rather than body as real.

The abuse ship is a story about trying to make the self human again through masochism. Bakura’s hate towards Ryou is always framed as self hate, that he can’t do things right, that’s he’s weak, or that he’s too gay - all the things we hate ourselves over. Ryou’s acceptance of Bakura’s abuse is also his acceptance of Bakura’s version of him, as a victim. It’s like two poles getting pushed to the extreme, each egging each other on until the whole structure snaps together like a jaw and holds on with a bond impossible to shake ever again. The pain of abuse makes the relationship permanent in a way that joy never could.

In his book _Asia as Method_ , Chen Kuan-tsing says that “The internal contradiction of colonial “assimilation” is implied in its aggressive attack. It requires that you admit to the inferiority of your own culture. It forces you to abandon your existential dignity. It then wins over your active consent to learning and acquiring everything that belongs to the governing colonizers. To do this presupposes a painful process of self-negation. Once you have done that, you are told that your imitation is not quite right: you are still not like “us”; you are, in essence, inferior. In this sense, assimilation has become the internal contradiction of colonialism. Paradoxically, are effect of assimilation was that it supplied a language of revolt. Memmi argues that “the colonized fights in the name of the very values of the colonizer, uses his techniques of thought and his method of combat. it must be added that this is the only action that the colonizer understands”” (Chen, 86).

The political human being that Oe talks about is exactly what I was trying to avoid and I wanted a language of the unconscious with which to describe this assimilation process, one that felt painful and spoke of pain. Instinctively, I was suspicious of the _jouissance_ that commercial culture requires that we desire, but which is actually the opposite of desire. I didn’t want to be happy because wanting to be happy required the subscription of a doctrine that recognized joy, health, and wealth as belonging to the human rather than the Other. The masochistic body that abuse fic and tendershipping gave me gave me more realistic feelings than an existence mediated by American politics and commercialism. It gave me a way to perversely desire.

For me, tendershipping was the story of the self violence of assimilation. Giving my abuser a face that I could fall in love with through another character that I could again desire through the once again recurring gaze of the abuser gave me the opportunity to fetishize the serial act of assimilation that I was committing against myself. It gave me a space to sexualize my yearnings in lieu of social spaces that made me afraid. _Yaoi_ is with us so that we can resist the social, in which mandatory performance of gender and race are surveilled. This is what tender shipping gives me - a space of masturbatory violence and desire, one in which others are not necessary and the Other is not needed.

 

 

 

 

Chen, Kuan-Hsing. _Asia as Method: toward Deimperialization_. Duke University Press, 2010.

Hirata, Hosea. _Circuits of Desire_. Duke University Press, 1994.

Iwabuchi, Koichi. _Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism_. Duke University Press, 2007.

**Author's Note:**

> I've always wanted to write this and now I have. If anyone reads this, thanks for being in my head with me for a bit. Hopefully, we share some perversities.


End file.
